Sitting at a desk all day is a great way to accumulate more belly fat. No surprise there. But what you might not have considered before is how the stress of your job might be contributing to the problem. If you want to trim your midsection consider firing that hot head of a boss you have and take up meditation to reduce the level of stress in your life.
I am serious. Stress has some side effects that are not well appreciated. One of them is that the hormone cortisol is generated in response to stress, and this hormone promotes the storage of fat in the abdominal area. This may seem like strange bodily response, and a particularly unhealthy one given that we tend to find ourselves in high-stress situations all the time when we are interacting with people whose response to us can determine whether or not we get paid next month.
But from an evolutionary point of view it is not hard to see why we might have developed the cortisol response over time. Long ago, when one of the major causes of stress was the prospect of starving to death (something that we rarely face today in the developed world) it actually made sense for the body to release cortisol and start accumulating fat whenever more food had been eaten than was needed for immediate energy needs. This way energy reserves would be on hand if the “impending famine” developed into a full-scale threat.
The trouble with this evolutionary adaption is that today when we get stressed out it is incredibly easy to find “comfort foods” to take the edge off the way we are feeling. Has the boss just handed you a project on Friday afternoon and hinted that it would be appreciated if it could be completed by Monday morning? No problem. You’ll curry favor by eating 12 chocolate bars and consuming twice that number of cups of coffee as you pull a weekender cursing him under your breath and telling yourself that stress builds character. But all it really builds is your waistline. Now this may be an exaggerated scenario, but you get the point.
In the past, the urge to eat in response to stress might have worked in your favor. Particularly if the cause of that stress was a looming absence of food in your life. But today, when foods loaded with empty calories (high on sugar, low on nutrition) are always within reach, the response to eat to make yourself feel better works against you. Foods high in sugar content will give you a temporary feeling of satisfaction, but your body will not be able to use all of the sugar that floods into your blood stream. So your body mops up the excess by converting it into fat which it stores away for that “rainy day” that it believes to be coming. After all, cortisol levels are high, so there must be a famine on the horizon…
If you want to avoid the waistline-swelling effects that stress tends to bring about you need to learn how to manage the stresses in your life. Sometimes the solution is obvious. If you spend time with someone who constantly complains about their life you are probably sacrificing your own physical health to shore up their mental health (by allowing them an out for their frustrations). Go out of your way to spend less time with these people.
If your job is high stress, try to identify what the main causes of stress are due to and look for a way to change the situation. If you cannot, consider looking for a new job. The rewards of a job rarely ever exceed the loss of health that follows a prolonged period of stress. If you colleagues don’t appreciate your worth, find a new group of people to work with. Too often we fall into whatever work environment is prepared to accept us and we stick with it even when we discover we hate what is going on within the company and the way it makes us feel. When that day arrives, look around for the escape pod. It is time to get out.
Take a yoga class if your body does not object to being twisted into odd postures. The goal here is to get rid of stress and put your mind right with the universe. That happens to be exactly the goal you want to achieve. You can also just cut more time out for yourself and plow into a great book that transports you out of yourself. Or take up a hobby that allows you to become obsessed with something which pays off in hour after hour of pure enjoyment.
Wherever possible, look for the path that provides less stress in your life. You will not be able to remove it all, but most of us endure a lot more stress than needs be the case. We pay for it in deteriorating health and expanding waistlines. So if you are sick of looking at that unsightly bulge of fat above your belt line, identify the sources of stress in your life and get rid of them.
If you need a comprehensive system for trimming your midsection, and even developing your own set of six pack abs, be sure to check out Carolyn Hansen’s book Claim Your Six Pack Abs, where she shows you how to take control of your body’s fat burning mechanism for optimum belly fat destroying results.
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